Yesterday, by accident, at night, I read about the barbaric things done to women in Israel by the Hamass terrorist attack on 10/7. I enjoin you not to follow that link, if you don’t want my nightmares last night.
And I woke up and was thinking… well, about a lot of things.
The only thing unusual about the way Hamass treated those women (and children) is that they killed most of them. Unusual, I mean from an historical perspective.
I was thinking of the rape of the Sabines, upon which the founding of Rome rested. Bunch of young braves, (given Romulus and Remus’s origin probably expelled from some community for being outlaws) claims land, then kills all men in a neighboring tribe and kidnaps every woman: crone, pregnant mother, young woman, barely pubescent child, rapes them and sometimes — sometimes — marries them. “Marries” them.
There are certain beats to this horror throughout history. And variables. Whether old women are killed is a variable. How young the age of “women” kidnapped is another. We know for a fact Plains Indians kidnapped girls as young as 6 and subjected them to the same treatment as all women. The horrific beats of this treatment included beatings, starving and serial rapes. It might or might not include the killing of the first child born. (Why? well, because it could be the woman’s murdered husband’s.) And everyone was subjected to this, from very young to very old.
The purpose, evolutionary was to break these women, to give them what was later described as Stockholm syndrome, so that they would, by the time they were given to a single man, cling to him as a protector and give him all their loyalty. So that they became willing broodmares for those who had killed their own families in front of them.
